ABSTRACT
Polar exploration, like science, was both cooperative and competitive; indeed, it was usually claimed to have pure science purposes, even if there were also commercial and nationalistic imperatives at work. In the same row is Ludwig Mond, whose endowment of a new chemistry laboratory in No. 20 Albemarle Street in 1896 was to aid James Dewar at a crucial stage of his hyperarctic exploration, and which soon came to resemble a ship's boiler room rather than a conventional laboratory. The snub led Dewar and Armstrong to write anonymous letters to the Times in which they protested at the Royal Society's bias towards biological research. Dewar's other significant contribution to chemistry was his proposal of a ring structure for pyridine, in which nitrogen replaced one carbon atom in a penta-carbon ring. At the Royal Institution Dewar enjoyed much better laboratory facilities than were available to him at Cambridge.
